People who have gotten jobs after front end dev, back end dev, or both. Post your projects?

Career Advice
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Hello everyone, I am currently doing FCC and pursuing a CS degree concurrently.
Ideally, i’d like to have decent somewhat presentable and improveable front end skills, and be at least halfway through the backend curriculum by the time i graduate.

I’ve looked through the posts of people that celebrate their getting jobs, but very few of them show their actual projects, and very few of them detail the specific skills they had or outside resources that they used.

I’ve seen some projects that people have posted, and they are waaaay out there.
One person claimed to get into a place as a front end dev after just finishing the front end dev certificate, but one of his projects was an immaculate netflix clone. (It had a lot of really nice features, etc.). It was just the front end shell, but it was really amazing.
Also, none of these posts are by people who have finished the backend curriculum! (Any reasons?)

What this information leads me to believe is that people who get into places after just finishing front end dev have skills that go beyond the curriculum here. (They are supplementing the curriculum with some side learning).

For the people out there who have gotten jobs after finishing the front end dev certificate, can you post your github profile or projects page?
Again, I would just crawl through the forum, but most of the posts made by these people do not show their projects!

If your skills do indeed go beyond the level of the curriculum here, can you share what it is you learned/practiced? I’m sure that everyone started at the same place at some point, so there must have been some skills you learned along the way or certain things you improved on while doing the curriculum.

I’m trying to take this thread in the direction of:

  1. Find out where the “mean” skill level is for getting jobs (helpful as a reference)
  2. Find out exactly what particular outside resources/search terms/building blocks each particular person used to reach their own skill level. (really helpful for getting better).

Please share!

As a seperate less important question.
There are some posts (success stories) that I have read where the OP mentions that he/she finished only some of the front end, and some of the back end and was able to get a job.
This leads me to believe that there are some skills that are specifically more important than others.
This may(i’m sure it does) vary by context, location, etc. but I am wondering if there are certain skills that are used much more than others in all contexts. Does anyone care to elaborate?

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My portfolio can be seen here: https://chrisgeelhoed.com/projects/

Although to be clear, only my “SpeedDrill” and “KnowWhatsup” projects were complete when I started working as a professional developer. The other 4 projects are side projects from afterward.

I agree that the people most successful are those who go above and beyond. My ‘KnowWhatsup’ App is what got the attention of my now employer, and it has a lot more functionality than the standard Wikipedia Viewer.

I guess the foundation of my development knowledge is FCC, CS50, stackoverflow, and google. Really, I just love to build software and when I don’t know how to do something, I google it until I can get it to work. Once you do this for long enough, you are bound to learn something!

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Wow KnowWhatsup looks amazing. Did you have any prior coding experience before FCC?
Right now, I can do the basic structure of a page, I have an understanding of the grid system and how to position my elements, and I know how to manipulate css classes with varying results.
This allows me to present information in an organized and color coordinated format, but that is about where it ends.
I can fulfuill the user stories of the projects on FCC, but I want to make things at least a little bit better.

I would like to be able to make dynamic elements such as the ones found in that app and other
Dynamic, responsive elements such as header/nav bars, dynamic clickable and responsive elements like that dropdown menu and arrows that scroll through the page.

Can you/someone else explain how you made the jump from a basic understanding of html/css/javascript (Like the first parts of the FCC curriculum) to being able to make better nav items and responsive tables?

Like you mentioned, for most people it is just try/practice/repeat, but there must have been some resources that you found (or a personal practice curriculum) which you found to be especially helpful in making that next jump.

I’ll be on the advanced projects pretty soon, and there is no practice section for making things those kinds of elements.
For example, with the simon game, you will obviously need to make elements that you can hover over and click, as well as slider bars that turn the game on/off, etc.
Can you /anyone share where or how they specifically made this next step?

Thanks for sharing!

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Very nice website @RadDog25.
Your blog subjects look interesting, the design is elegant and your projects are neat.
I tried your voting app - I didn’t have the option but I take both cream AND sugar in my coffee, hehe.
Cheers

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wow. looking at your website and your projects that you made before you got the job makes me realize how much more skill I need to gain. all my projects that I’ve made up to this point just feel so amateurish compared to yours. how far into the fcc course were you when you got the job?

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I wouldn’t feel extremely bad, i’ve seen some profiles of people who have been able to get jobs that aren’t THAT good. Out of the very few portfolios i’ve seen of people who have had jobs on here, that is probably the best one.

(But they are better than just being able to present information).

That’s why i’m starting this thread; to see where the average is out of all of them.

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@greg-han Before starting FCC, I had a bit of programming experience with a language called matlab but HTML, CSS, and Javascript were all new. I found Javascript to be ok, but CSS was confusing when starting out. I think you are making a good choice by focusing on that first. From there it is just baby steps. Just solve one problem at a time and understand that learning this stuff is a process that takes time.

@Kundera @Soupedenuit Thanks guys! :slight_smile:

@Sandris Don’t worry about that - just keep working. My initial projects looked much different than the ones I share on my portfolio. The Wikipedia Viewer and Simon project shown are both second attempts! I was hired after completing the front end certificate, and I had also completed CS50 and a few other side projects.

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RadDog25,wow that’s so cool! Did you find any particular resources (Outside those you mentioned), or particular learning method that /was/were helpful when making the leap from basic design to a more dynamic layout?
eg. After you had a web page, you would have then said
"You know what, I want to make a dynamic nav bar"

The reason I ask is that your pages share many simliarities, so I would guess that at a certain point, you would have gotten stuck, then you would have started using particular search words such as “dynamic javascript”, "nav bars’, “shadowing effects”, etc.
You maybe would have then continued building on the same search words, and you may have found a particular “style” of JS that worked or some kind of building style from these search words.

Can you go into a little more depth?

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@RadDog25 great job on your portfolio!

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@adela05 Thanks!

@greg-han I’ve found google, stackoverflow, and youtube to be the best place to go when getting stated. MDN is also excellent, but can be overly technical for someone just tying to get a laymans understanding.

So if you wanted to build a nav bar you might start with google, then learn that you can use a CSS framework like Bootstrap to do the heavy lifting, then checkout Bootstrap’s docs on how to implement it. Then if I found Bootrap’s docs to be confusing, I might head to youtube and search “Bootstrap”.

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I’ve not been hired yet, but I think a good resource for me was the W3Schools Bootstrap Tutorial. I went through each exercise and made a page trying out each element (Sort of a “use it or lose it” philosophy). After completing that, I felt like I had a lot more control over elements like navbars, tables, carousels, etc. You might also want to go through the CSS exercises on the same website. Although I didn’t go through each one, that website has been a huge resource for me. Anyway, here’s the Bootstrap Cheat Sheet that I made while going through each exercise. It’s nothing spectacular, but making it helped me have a better idea of what I could do and how I could do it.
Best of luck!